“It’s good to hear critical voices about this ‘Baltic Sea mystery,'” Brüchert wrote in an email. “What has been generously ignored by the Ocean-X team is that most of the samples they have brought up from the sea bottom are granites and gneisses and sandstones.”

These, he explains, are exactly what one would expect to see in a glacial basin, which is what the Baltic Sea is — a region carved out by glacial ice long ago.

Along with the mundane rocks, the divers also gave him a single loose piece of basaltic rock, a type of rock that forms from hardened lava. This is out of place on the seafloor, but not unusual. “Because the whole northern Baltic region is so heavily influenced by glacial thawing processes, both the feature and the rock samples are likely to have formed in connection with glacial and postglacial processes,” he wrote. “Possibly these rocks were transported there by glaciers.”

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Interesting. When you ask ACTUAL experts to look at the thing, they find it’s really not so mysterious at all. As we said in the first article on this, the obvious answer was that it was glacial considering the context of the thing. That took just a little bit of geological knowledge and a quick Google search. Funny they didn’t try that…